“Much better. But indeed the doctor did me good.”
“The doctor? Why, you would none of his cures.”
“No, but I mean—you will say I am nought—but knocking the old fool down—somehow—it soothed me.”
“Amiable dove! how thy little character opens more and more every day, like a rosebud. I read thee all wrong at first.”
“Nay, Denys, mistake me not, neither. I trust I had borne with his idle threats, though in sooth his voice went through my poor ears; but he was an infidel, or next door to one, and such I have been taught to abhor. Did he not as good as say, we owed our inward parts to men with long Greek names, and not to Him, whose name is but a syllable, but whose hand is over all the earth? Pagan!”
“So you knocked him down forthwith—like a good Christian.”
“Now, Denys, you will still be jesting. Take not an ill man's part. Had it been a thunderbolt from Heaven, he had met but his due; yet he took but a sorry bolster from this weak arm.”
“What weak arm?” inquired Denys, with twinkling eyes. “I have lived among arms, and by Samson's hairy pow never saw I one more like a catapult. The bolster wrapped round his nose and the two ends kissed behind his head, and his forehead resounded, and had he been Goliath, or Julius Caesar, instead of an old quacksalver, down he had gone. St. Denys guard me from such feeble opposites as thou! and above all from their weak arms—thou diabolical young hypocrite.”
The river took many turns, and this sometimes brought the wind on their side instead of right astern. Then they all moved to the weather side to prevent the boat heeling over too much all but a child of about five years old, the grandson of the boatman, and his darling; this urchin had slipped on board at the moment of starting, and being too light to affect the boat's trim, was above, or rather below, the laws of navigation.
They sailed merrily on, little conscious that they were pursued by a whole posse of constables armed with the bailiff's writ, and that their pursuers were coming up with them; for if the wind was strong, so was the current.